Yes. This is what you get when a Microsoft eats a Yahoo!
Soft!
So Microsoft is offering $44.6 billion for Yahoo! Great, good for them.
This whole deal is soft.
I mean, this whole deal is Soft!
If Microsoft has proven anything with its many acquisitions, it’s that money can’t buy you market dominance (licensing your product can, which is why they are where they are today).
Daring Fireball has a great little breakdown of things.
So I’m a little late this this, but FFFFound is hot. Very hot. I think of it as Flickr with a purpose, or Flickr with a brain or something. Dalematic told me, “It’s better than going to the bookstore …almost.” What is great about the site is the simplicity. It’s easy to start browsing just the images that speak to you.
Group94 – a solid redesign of their site.
A few years back, Felix Turner over at Airtight Interactive developed a few great Flash demos for displaying photos in Flash. You just upload your JPG’s update the XML and bingo, a simple, elegant Flash photo viewer.
I’m using it for some of my own photos and I love it:
The design portal model we’re all come to know over the last 8-10 years is quickly becoming irrelevant. Attention is obviously turning to many blogs, but even when taking design blogs into account, there seems to be a void for central places for inspiration, news, conversation and education in web design.
Some design portals are still around – K10K, Surfstation, DesignIsKinky – but even these have become enormous, inert shells for news updates within a small iframe (as if they weren’t used as this all along).
Other portals are aware of the need for change and are evolving, like NewsToday, which is now QBN. BD4D still seems to be going strong, but with events, not so much with their site (which used to be a portal).
And then there’s heavy weights like theFWA which is the de facto place for satisfying your Flash cravings.
Ultrashock has gone in an interesting direction and transformed themselves to a creative asset resource site (think Veer with social networking). Don’t worry, they still have the Bombshock Awards.
Fallen to the wayside are Pixelsurgeon, Lounge72, and Moluv (that I was an editor on for 3 years).
So what’s next? Is there a next? With more and more companies and businesses realizing the power of design – online, product and otherwise – the agendas are different. Job postings are growing more and more important on the design portals that have survived (I see Krop everywhere). We’re also seeing more and more endorsements and advertising from big businesses on design sites, which tells us more people are taking design seriously.
It’s much bigger than web design now, and the message of portals needs to be bigger and broader. Advertising models are being turned on their heads, old media will be trying to figure out digital media distribution for what I bet will be a while and what people consider their TV and their computer aren’t quite clear anymore.
As the plates of interactive design shift, be prepared for some rebuilding.
Alfa Romeo, from the set 12.15.2007.
Nope. It’s not.
I’m still planning to retire my wonderful Treo 650 this Christmas and replace it with a new 8GB iPhone. That is, an iPhone with EDGE-speed internet. The reason I’m perfectly fine with this (and I’m sure most iPhone owners are) is because an iPhone can’t (yet) exploit the benefits of a 3G network.
I know that when I get to work at Schematic, I have access to our wifi network, and I know when I go home at night, I have access to my wifi network there too. No need to deal with EDGE.
And the iPhone doesn’t (yet) have the Adobe Flash plug-in so I can’t visit high bandwidth Flash sites that require a fast internet connection.
And you can’t downloading huge files or applications (without hacks).
So yeah, EDGE sucks for speed, but the iPhone can wait for 3G.
from the set 11.24.2007
Let’s keep today’s post simple because my life is crazy. Just a circle.
The Barbarians Are At The Gate, But Microsoft Moves To Protect Office Revenues – By their very nature, corporations like Microsoft are not capable of taking risks in the name of innovation – unless they are creating a new paradigm or a new market.
Microsoft realizes that Google Docs – available online and free – is a threat to its Office suite of products (primarily Word & Excel). In response, they’re ramping up for their own online versions of their products, but they’re not getting it right:
Microsoft is falling into the classic trap of failing to realize the disruptive nature of a new competitive technology, instead focusing on the massive revenues it generates from their aging Office suite.
Someone makes a good point in the comments of this article, “You realize if Microsoft shipped a full online Office product, they would cannibalize themselves, right?”
This comment is true, but an online Office product would only cannibalize themselves if they remained entrenched in their current business model. Short term, this is the easier path to take, but long term, Microsoft shouldn’t expect its products to be viewed as relevant or useful.
Contrast this screw-up by Microsoft with the risk Apple is taking with the iPhone. One of the reasons Apple is able to dive into the mobile industry is because they’re being disruptive and establishing a new paradigm. Aside from the innovative Visual Voicemail, Apple is not locked into any crappy AT&T specific services for broadband, games or anything. You sync your iPhone with iTunes, which not only allows you to sync music and video content, but also patches bugs and adds new features. AT&T is simply a communication connection – as it should be.
Apple also don’t have any presence in this market, so like Dylan said, when you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.
Of course this is only partly true. Apple could have lost years and years of preparation and research and tens of millions of dollars that went into making the iPhone …but that’s why it’s called taking a risk.
Risks have potentially huge payoffs.
I love the comment Paul Arden makes in his book, Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite:
Most people are reasonable, that’s why they only do reasonably well.
These are from the QBN Sessions (via NewsToday)
Michael Muller – “And that is Batman smoking crack.”
Joshua Davis – “I’m somewhat responsible for what you’re seeing on screen …but there’s a lot of loss of control.”
I logged into my LinkedIn account this morning and had this invitation.
I laughed and thought LinkedIn was getting funny with their tone of voice.
Then I realized that abbreviating doesn’t work with peoples’ names – especially on buttons. See below.
Copan in bag, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.
In the grand George Carlinian tradition of Things That Are Pissing me Off:
I live in New York City.
My friend lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
My friend wants me to come and visit him, so as we’re talking on the phone he says, “Hey, you really have to come down and visit one of these days…”
Has this happened to you?
Why don’t people understand their locations in relation to other places?